Medical practitioners often provide hands-on medical care. For example, a physician, nurse, care-giver, or other individual may need to perform a touch-related procedure on a patient. In these touch-related procedures, the medical practitioner uses a body part, such as one or more fingers or hands, to contact a surface on or in a body of a patient. The medical practitioner then may use his or her sense of touch to assess a condition of the patient or to treat the patient. One touch-related diagnostic procedure is palpation. Palpation relates to a physical examination with one or more fingers, hands or other body part to feel or detect by the sense of touch a condition of the body or the location of a part of the body. A palpation procedure may be performed by a medical practitioner to make a locative determination, to make a diagnostic assessment, and/or to therapeutically treat the patient. For example, by properly palpating a region, the medical practitioner can locate a feature, such as a vein, artery, lymph node, organ, cellular abnormality, bone or other hard tissue, or other feature, underlying the skin in that region. By careful feeling of a feature, the medical practitioner can make objective or subjective determinations of abnormal conditions. Also, a medical practitioner or other person can use palpation to perform a vascular assessment on a patient. Vascular assessment procedures, such as pulse rate, pulse strength, thrill detection, etc., provide the medical practitioner with a preliminary determination of a vascular condition.
The effectiveness of a palpation procedure is dependent on the skill of the person performing the procedure. However, palpation is a difficult procedure to train. Typically, the medical practitioner is trained clinically, through direct contact with patients. Early in the trainee's career, the likelihood of judgmental errors or diagnostic oversights may be high due to the medical practitioner's limited palpation experience. Even when properly supervised, training on actual patients is less than desirable since the trainee is unable to experiment and explore without risking injury to the patient. In addition, it is difficult to expose even experienced medical practitioners with uncommon palpation scenarios or with rare abnormalities.
To lessen the amount of training on actual patients, training simulators have been developed. In one training simulator, a physical mannequin is used to train the medical practitioner in performing a touch-related procedure. However, the physical mannequin can be cumbersome and difficult to manufacture. Additionally, the physical mannequin is limited in the number of situations that can be demonstrated. Another training simulator consists of a computer simulation of a patient's pulse. However, this computer simulator does not provide the trainee with a simulation of the feel of the procedure. Instead, the computer merely provides visual and/or audible pulsation feedback to the trainee. Thus, the trainee does not come away from the simulation having experienced the procedure through his or her sense of touch, nor does the computer simulator of pulse allow for the simulation of other palpation related procedures.